After six months of uncertainty, I crave stability and peace.
Vulnerable to positive suggestions, when I pick up a book and read, "Read a poem a day," it clicks, and I know this is what I need for positivity and peace.
I pull from my shelf a 1929 copy of World's Best Loved Poems. It is bound in faded Levi-blue, and the inner pages are dark yellow, the brooding faces of ancient poets' paintings dare me to not love their poems.
After a short contemplation as to what order to read the poems, I choose poem number one. I will read the poems in order regardless of poet, subject or mood of the day.
Day one is a Sunday. The weather is beautiful and I spend the morning on the deck reading and pondering the magic of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Builders.
All are architects of Fate,
Working within these walls of Time;
Each day, each phrase seems to be the contemplative words most needed.
The unexpected challenge in Poem a Day, is wanting to keep reading. Just one more poem, my greedy mind tempts, but when I force myself to settle on the words of just one poem, and let the words run through my mind like flowing water over rocks, I have added insight to carry on. Because 19th century poet Edward R Sill challenged his reader to find Opportunity in one's broken sword, I do not make comparisons between myself and the younger participants in a class.
James Whitcomb Riley's Out to Old Aunt Mary's sparks a conversation between Mom and me. I want to know why she would pack her noncompliant children in the car and drive 90 minutes to visit her old aunts. We conclude that visiting is almost a thing of the past, for which I feel remorse after the nostalgic beauty of Riley's exquisite retelling of childhood visiting.
Alfred Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, the romanticized bravery of the brigade that rode into a trap, simply brings sadness, a reminder of old war and modern war, both time tested futility of loss and pain.
On the day of Ralph Waldo Emerson's visit, he solved a ten year mystery. Emerson speaks of beauty in context in his poem One and All.
I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough; I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now;
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear,--they sang to my eye.
He finishes his thoughts recalling that as an adult he only seeks for truth and in his childish days he only sought after beauty. As he cries out,
"I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth."
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
...he discovers the perfect whole is beauty and truth.
Less than a hundred years earlier, another poet contemplated beauty when he was overcome with emotion after visiting an exhibit of Greek antiquity. A Grecian urn spoke to him with such depth that he went home and wrote a luscious poem that has spoken to millions through the ages. In the last couplet, Keats writes:
Beauty is truth, truth is beauty
That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
Keats' declaration was a presumptuous mystery that plagued me for years. Emerson solved the mystery--the perfect wholeness that comes from the guarantee that truth will always be beautiful and beauty will always be truth, thus beauty is truth and truth is beauty.
In essence, I have to agree it is indeed all we need to know. I should have trusted Keats.
Vulnerable to positive suggestions, when I pick up a book and read, "Read a poem a day," it clicks, and I know this is what I need for positivity and peace.
I pull from my shelf a 1929 copy of World's Best Loved Poems. It is bound in faded Levi-blue, and the inner pages are dark yellow, the brooding faces of ancient poets' paintings dare me to not love their poems.
After a short contemplation as to what order to read the poems, I choose poem number one. I will read the poems in order regardless of poet, subject or mood of the day.
Day one is a Sunday. The weather is beautiful and I spend the morning on the deck reading and pondering the magic of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Builders.
All are architects of Fate,
Working within these walls of Time;
Each day, each phrase seems to be the contemplative words most needed.
The unexpected challenge in Poem a Day, is wanting to keep reading. Just one more poem, my greedy mind tempts, but when I force myself to settle on the words of just one poem, and let the words run through my mind like flowing water over rocks, I have added insight to carry on. Because 19th century poet Edward R Sill challenged his reader to find Opportunity in one's broken sword, I do not make comparisons between myself and the younger participants in a class.
James Whitcomb Riley's Out to Old Aunt Mary's sparks a conversation between Mom and me. I want to know why she would pack her noncompliant children in the car and drive 90 minutes to visit her old aunts. We conclude that visiting is almost a thing of the past, for which I feel remorse after the nostalgic beauty of Riley's exquisite retelling of childhood visiting.
Alfred Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, the romanticized bravery of the brigade that rode into a trap, simply brings sadness, a reminder of old war and modern war, both time tested futility of loss and pain.
On the day of Ralph Waldo Emerson's visit, he solved a ten year mystery. Emerson speaks of beauty in context in his poem One and All.
I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough; I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now;
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear,--they sang to my eye.
He finishes his thoughts recalling that as an adult he only seeks for truth and in his childish days he only sought after beauty. As he cries out,
"I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth."
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird;
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.
...he discovers the perfect whole is beauty and truth.
Less than a hundred years earlier, another poet contemplated beauty when he was overcome with emotion after visiting an exhibit of Greek antiquity. A Grecian urn spoke to him with such depth that he went home and wrote a luscious poem that has spoken to millions through the ages. In the last couplet, Keats writes:
Beauty is truth, truth is beauty
That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
Keats' declaration was a presumptuous mystery that plagued me for years. Emerson solved the mystery--the perfect wholeness that comes from the guarantee that truth will always be beautiful and beauty will always be truth, thus beauty is truth and truth is beauty.
In essence, I have to agree it is indeed all we need to know. I should have trusted Keats.
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